


The Orchard

by aerialiste



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alpha (Georgia), Down to Agincourt Secret Santa, Down to Agincourt Secret Santa 2016, Established Castiel/Dean Winchester, Established Relationship, Inspired by Down to Agincourt Series - seperis, M/M, Orchards, Stone Fruits, springtime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-18
Updated: 2017-01-18
Packaged: 2018-09-18 02:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9363362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerialiste/pseuds/aerialiste
Summary: Dean suddenly has trouble swallowing. “I’ve had a ripe peach before, Cas. This one’s for you.”A tip-in scene for Book V ofDown to Agincourt.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_ladylark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_ladylark/gifts).
  * Inspired by [It's the Stars That Lie](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2033814) by [seperis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seperis/pseuds/seperis). 



_Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find truth, for it is hard to discover and hard to attain._ [Heraclitus, _Fragments_ ]

•

_—Day TK—_

“But why won’t you tell me,” Cas murmurs against Dean’s knuckles, switching easily to the other hand as Dean uses his left to latch their cottage door behind them.

Gloria had put them up not in one of Alpha’s main houses but a short distance away in a small stand-alone outbuilding, a gesture Dean couldn’t have said at the time why he appreciated; but after having their cabin and/or actual goddamned bedroom be patrol report central for the last year, he now feels a deep appreciation for the space around them, one that has a lot to do with sleeping in and maybe not a little to do with his private personal project of seeing how loud he can make Cas get. (Which, way louder than previous experiences would have revealed, on a guess, and he’s not even trying not to feel smug about that.)

Dean glances at him as they head down the porch steps, a familiar weakness stealing behind his diaphragm at the sight of those closed eyes, and the flushed lips pressed against his skin. He tightens his fingers around Cas’s, tanned and supple. “Because it’s a _surprise_ , okay, and somehow I get the idea you haven’t had nearly enough of those.”

Cas drops their hands between the two of them as they step out into calf-high grass (Alpha could use a damn home improvement week, Dean thinks, wondering if he should assign a lawn-mowing detail to help out Elijah and his work crews), tender blades still sparkling with morning dew. “Perhaps more of the last year of my life has been more surprising than you realize,” Cas responds acerbically, and Dean figures he deserves that.

“Okay, hilarious, but I mean good ones, Cas. You know. Small ones. Brownies—the cocoa and sugar kind, not the kind with pointy teeth. Finding balconies and ledges for you to stand on, so you can scare the shit out of me. The way it feels when—“ and here Dean runs dry, and stops walking; they stand too closely together on an abandoned cow trail, grass bitten short, and Dean tries desperately not to think about how Cas had woken him up this morning.

It doesn’t matter, Cas laughs anyway, a rough sound, and pulls him forward. “Okay, so show me. I’m not expecting dizzying heights. Or sweetened comestibles. Or—anything, really.”

Dean holds back a smile. “Fine. Low expectations. That’s how you get surprised.”

Cas makes a noncommittal noise as they step wide across a mostly dry ditch, bootprints in it showing how long it’d been since the last rain. The back of Dean’s neck is damp already with the late-spring warmth, and the sun is only barely over the [Pine Mountain trail range](http://www.pinemountaintrail.org/trail-descriptions.html), just to their southeast. He squeezes Cas’s fingers, pulling loose from them so he can scramble up the other side of the runoff, bared roots serving as grips to haul himself up. He pauses at the top to reach down, but of course Cas is already standing next to him, dusting red dirt off both palms fastidiously and looking across at a dim treeline.

“You wanna move to Alpha?” he asks curiously, as Cas wipes humidity off his forehead, frowning. “I mean, the winters’d be better. We wouldn’t nearly die in our own goddamn cabin.”

“Our cabin is fine, it just needs additional windproofing,” Cas answers absently, “and winter is far more severe here than you might think. Remember, I’ve spent weeks at Alpha. Appalachian Trail hikers often had to start out from Georgia with snow still on the ground, just to have a chance of making it to Maine before the next winter begins.”

“I don’t want to know how you know that, do I,” says Dean, taking Cas’s hand again (and when would that ever stop being a small jolt of surprise in itself, warm fingers laced tightly between his, like a privilege that had become a right and then something he would guard with his entire body to keep and have every day). “You don’t seem like the backpacking type.”

Cas shrugs easily, hair in his eyes. “I looked into it, before everything happened. I had the physical stamina and the thought of being alone, of not having to talk to anyone, was—appealing.”

They’ve headed toward the treeline, which Dean thinks probably grew up so thickly around a creek, but Dean pulls Cas’s hand against his chest to steer them eastward alongside it, rather than directly into it. “Then I found out how overpopulated the long hikes have become, and by that point Croatoan had spread, and I needed to get to him….”

Cas doesn’t usually trail off. “So where, um, where were you, when it started,” Dean asks, trying to sound more casual than he feels, kicking stray pecans off the path. Cas lets go of his hand again and stoops down to pick up one, slowly peeling away the soft moldy greenish-black case in quarters, exposing a brown striated nutshell.

“I was in Roanoke, Virginia, alone, following a dead lead,” he says finally, lifting the pecan unselfconsciously to his nose to sniff it, then turning to throw it off into the trees. Branches sough above them, lofting in place with the first stirrings of a breeze. The back of Dean’s neck prickles. He’s never heard anything about how Cas had found his way back to Kansas, or South Dakota, or wherever the other Dean and Bobby were based at the time. He’s never really felt it was okay to ask.

“The highways and interstates were pretty much immediately impassible. I suppose I got to through-hike after all, as I had to walk outside of the city to find empty outbound freeway lanes. It wasn’t hard to find cars that still had gas. People had…turned, and then abandoned them. So I mostly had what I needed, and I moved fast, to get to Bobby, to get to…to him. Bottles of water, power bars. Handguns. I took a woman’s leather purse,” and here he turns blindly to Dean, who stops walking and wraps an arm around his shoulders without thinking, drawing Cas into his chest.

“Jesus,” Dean breathes against his hair, trying not to think about the contents of those cars, about Cas, half-starved and not himself, moving against the mindless crowds, purpose single-pointed: to find and protect Dean. He presses his lips against the side of Cas’s neck. How many, why hadn't he—of course.

“You couldn’t fly. How long did it take?”

Cas is silent for a long moment while Dean just holds him, fighting down the urge to pull him even more closely. “It took about four and a half weeks to get to Sioux Falls. It’s—I started needing sleep. And food. I hadn’t even managed to manifest my blade, before, like flying, it all became—complicated. I can’t really explain—”

“It’s okay, Cas,” Dean says into his hairline, lips barely moving. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I was lucky,” Cas says shortly, stepping back and looking up into Dean’s eyes, expression dark and blank. “If I hadn’t made it back before the Host decided to—I was strong, and still fast. Rather than fight bands of Croats, I moved by night. It was…mostly tedious. And surprisingly lonely.”

“No cellphones,” realizes Dean, nodding and taking his hand again, with another kiss to the forehead. “We’re nearly there, by the way. And this is a way better surprise than the end of the world. Get ready for a new first.”

•

Castiel had been headed northwest on I-70 when he’d finally been forced to pull over.

In the end, it wasn’t because he was out of gas, or because stalled cars and trucks blocked the interstate completely, making it impossible to go around. He’d actually had to go off-road surprisingly few times, mostly thanks to multi-vehicle collisions; drivers long since dragged from their cars and either devoured or turned, batteries drained, stuck horns no longer blaring, headlights dimmed. Only very rarely was the clump of accidents so bad and the shoulder so impassable (once, in Missouri, a washed-out bridge) that he simply had to change cars: walk to the other side of the metal tangles and steel himself to pull whatever remained from some driver’s seat.

Then the ritual: jump-start the battery with any erratic juice he had left, or hot-wire the ignition the way Bobby taught him. Check the gas level, the oil dipstick, the tires. Sometimes, to his relief and pleasure—an uncomfortable pleasure, rapidly followed by some thick sickened feeling he suspected was shame—all he had to do was turn the key, because whoever had been about to die had startled presence of mind enough, was so schooled and conditioned by habit, that she’d actually turned off her car in the moments before death.

It was almost always _she,_ he noticed. The ones who left behind well-organized purses and center consoles and gloveboxes, handbags he ransacked for their stores of tissues and lotions, candy and gum, painkillers and sometimes stronger prescription drugs. The women who kept bottled water in the cup holder, fruit rollups and energy bars in the back floorboards or seat pockets.

When forced to switch cars, he brought everything with him, carried it in the largest handbag he’d yet found: [a caramel-brown leather satchel](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/119908408802430953/), its dulled gold stamp reading _kate spade_. He addressed Kate, sometimes, not just in his head but maybe even aloud; thanked her for the water, for the emollients that stopped his lips from burning.

Even this far from big cities the sky roiled with dark smoke, heavy and unsettled. He’d lost enough grace not to be able to tell what exactly was burning, which chemicals and pollutants sifted down through the air to sting his eyes, the membranes inside his nose and mouth. It was sifting away too, his grace, confusingly but undeniably; he lost more of it by the hour, drying up like water evaporating from a puddle. _I wasted time_ , he thought, not with bitterness, but numbly, _and now doth time waste me._

Sometimes in the cars he found children, their age, race, gender obscured by decay. He needed to remember, tried to, that they were people, that they were just as beloved. Whatever rags the children were wearing, whatever length of hair remained on their skulls, he called them all Mary, because that name had meant something. He unstrapped them gently from their seats, arranged families of people together by the side of the interstate and started the fire, leaving quickly before it could draw attention. He prayed sometimes but only once driving away, safe behind the wheel; sang _Dies Irae_ or the קדיש, mumbled requiems under his breath, larynx dry, throat choking on the notes.

Long ago, pressed into clammy stone, listening enrapt to that one contralto nun, her voice like rich soft rainwater gliding over the modal syllables of “[Ave, generosa](https://youtu.be/2fRN7Czrs8Q)”—transcendent hymns she wrote in Mary’s praise. Listened for decades, half a century, until her clear skin wrinkled and she grew old, until she was not. She had something he no longer has, did he ever have it. Did humanity. Was it a thing that existed once, that he helped smash. Did she still write psalms in her heaven now, did she still cradle and lift into the light that glorious lucent glasslike orb of her fragile but luminous faith.

 _for heaven’s flood poured into you_  
_as heaven’s word was clothed in flesh in you_  
_you are the lily, gleaming white, upon which G-d_  
_has fixed his gaze before all else created_  
_around you he enwrapped his warm embrace  
so that his son was suckled at your breast_

He drove and drove. He had to get to him, it took infuriating days, weeks, he didn’t stop at first, didn’t yet need sleep. Drove faster at night, with the eyes gleaming out at him from the roadside.

And yet in the end it was a billboard that did it, just a stupid fucking billboard, peeling and weathered, sticking out crooked from a neglected cornfield, and he had to pull over because he was laughing too hard to keep driving.

[HELL IS REAL](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hell_Is_Real.jpg), it read with conviction, in uppercase block letters, white against black; and of course across the front someone already had spraypainted the livid scarlet warning.

He couldn’t help it, even knowing it was happening. He watched himself break open like he’d seen happen to people before, mere meaningless hysteria but there it was anyway, like swallowing down nausea or gasping in fear, something bodies just do that couldn’t really be avoided. So he gave into it, managed to get himself out of the car—no one for miles, if the plague ever had been there it had moved on—barely got the door shut and then just folded over against it, forehead smacking painfully hard against the glass window as his mouth pressed against the bare crook of his arm, convulsing, opened and biting into skin to muffle the sounds. His shirt sleeve torn off up high where he’d used it to bandage someone, someone who immediately hadn’t made it. Wasted effort.

HELL IS REAL. They had no idea. Hell was here, hell was now.

He’d already spent forty years plummeting down through the worst it had to offer, and this was infinitely worse and more wrong because it wasn’t supposed to happen, wasn’t meant to be—this world had been gifted to humanity as a deliberately planned paradise, and both the gardeners and their caretakers, they’d conspired, unintentionally, through a series of colossally egotistical, blinded choices, to uproot, to defile, to spoil everything that mattered most—

He finally caught his breath, straightened, reached up to wipe the wetness off his face. His hand came away dripping and filthy, streaked with soot. It was hard to swallow, hard to make his chest stop whatever it was doing. His arm was dirty where his face had rubbed it. He should use one of the bottles of water to wash, probably. Find more water.

Vaguely gray and furry, an animal darted off through corn stalks that quivered and rattled behind it. Eventually he would need to eat but he couldn’t think about that, not yet, when hell was so nearby. Something he could catch out of the corner of an eye, shaken loose inside him, so proximate it throbbed.

Hell meant that he was maybe four hours outside of Lebanon, and it had taken him almost a month to get there; and Castiel felt terrified not of what he would, but of what he might not find, when he arrived.

•

Dean wonders if it’s too ridiculous to tell Cas to close his eyes as they draw closer. There's a broken-down barn, silvery and gap-toothed with boards; a twisted and mostly former stand of trees, still spaced at even intervals.

Almost immediately he feels glad he hadn’t said anything; this way he gets to see Cas’s eyes widen and the beginnings of a smile on his face. “It’s a fruit orchard?”

“Well, what’s left of one,” says Dean, tugging him underneath one of the few survivors, a narrow-leaved peach tree, limbs twisted, bark damp and black with dew. “You have to keep replanting if you want to keep an orchard going; someone let this one die off.”

Cas reaches up into the tree, letting his fingers comb slowly through the fine green leaves. “Fruit trees and humans have the most curious symbiosis.”

“Yeah?” says Dean, rocking back onto his heels and secretly pleased he’s about to get a botany lecture, not that he would ever admit it. “How so?”

Cas looks at him narrowly, as if suspicious he’s about to be mocked. “Well, certain species—apples, for example—won’t bloom at all, much less bear, without human intervention. Which you only undertake because you find the fruit edible.”

“Right, yeah. So about that,” says Dean, wedging a foot into the tree’s main fork and pulling himself half up into the foliage, grabbing one of the highest branches and pulling it down just enough so that he can grope amidst the thicker leaves at the tree’s top. “There’s—hang on, just— _got it_.”

Cas watches as Dean bounces lightly back to the ground, something held loosely and triumphantly in his good hand. “This, Cas. This is—trust me, you’re gonna like this.”

He hands the fruit to Cas, whose fingers close around it carefully. He opens them to reveal an oval peach, which is surprisingly rosy, pink-blushed in the first light of the day.

“Things you’ve never had,” explains Dean, sounding pleased. “A tree-ripened peach.”

“I’ve had peaches from cans,” Cas objects, turning the small fruit over in his palms.

“Yeah, well, those things aren’t fucking peaches,” Dean says loftily, shouldering him. “For one thing, canned food isn’t real food. For another thing, it’s—”

“Soft,” says Cas quietly, brushing a finger against the skin.

Dean blinks. “That’s right. They get peeled when they're canned. This still has its skin, like nature intended.”

“And it’s warm—from the sun,” Cas adds, holding it briefly against his cheek, then his lips. For the first time Dean reconsiders his brilliant idea as possibly causing more arousal than he can handle.

Cas verifies this concern for him when he half-kneels and pulls a knife out of his boot. It’s one of the ceramic-bladed ones, delicate and flexible, and Dean freezes as Cas runs it carefully against the peach’s surface, scraping the velvet into a thin silken drift he then blows away with a puff of his lips. “In Rome they were called Persian apples, I remember. You should have some.”

Dean suddenly has trouble swallowing. “I’ve had a ripe peach before, Cas. This one’s for you.”

Cas slices gently into it, warm juice welling into his palm; unselfconsciously, he bends his head to lap at the trickle and this just isn’t _fair_.

“Here—” Dean says hoarsely; he reaches out for both knife and peach before Cas can commit further indecencies with them.

Cas surrenders both, head on one side. “What are you—?”

“Just open your mouth and eat the fucking peach, Cas.”

Dean slices a thin sliver out of the fruit and lifts it to Cas’s lips on the knife blade; he couldn’t look away if their lives depended on it, because Cas’s eyelids flutter shut and the red-blushed piece of peach disappears between his lips, a droplet of juice escaping one corner of his mouth and hell yeah is Dean going to kiss that away, as soon as Cas opens his eyes.

He does and they’re electric, startled in his face. “What is that, how is it so—“

“Your first tree peach? I don’t know, man. You’ve been living wrong. And we’re in Georgia, so I figured there had to be some, asked Amy, she said there was an old orchard out here—“

Cas’s eyes are still shocked indigo. “Can we—can we grow these?”

“In Kansas? Sure, as long as the last freeze isn’t too late, we could ask Teresa what she thinks, plus there’s probably some hardier varieties that do better farther north, so I don’t know why n—”

He stops because Cas has bent his head and is lapping the juice from Dean’s palm, slowly licking down the length of his arm where it trickles down to his elbow, then holding up Dean’s hand and sinking his teeth into the peach like Dean’s hand is his own, which, Dean reflects, it is, since basically right now his whole lit-up _body_ belongs to him—

“Come _here_ ,” Dean groans, and manages to separate Cas and peach far enough apart from each other (despite protests) to drop the knife in the grass, location unimportant, and pull Cas toward him, other hand on his chin, licking into his mouth, warm and sweet and _his_.

“I might start to like this,” Cas says against his mouth, tentative and breathless, and Dean doesn’t really know which _this_ Cas means—stone fruit? surprises? sleeping past sunrise? helpless uncensored high-pitched noises after midnight? making out in orchards? or the way their mouths fit together, slipping open, firm and yielding both—so he takes it as permission to wrap both arms around him (peach held safely dripping behind Cas’s back) and tilt more deeply into the kiss, tightening the fingers of his other hand into the hair at the base of Cas’s neck, trying not to smile too hard, because he’s awesome, and because Cas is going to get plums, and nectarines, and jesus fuck also _cherries_ , surely cherries grow in Kansas? and what about those super-sweet little apricots that used to show up in grocery stores for maybe two weeks every summer? But Dean forgets all about fruit, after some elastic interval of time, because it’s a warm late spring morning and they’re safe, and together, and the shape of his life’s purpose is in his arms; and because, well. Because it’s forever here.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a hideously late Secret Agincourt Winter-Celebration-of-Your-Choice gift, for the infinitely patient and lovely Ladylark. NB that this fic references Day 87 (from chapter 5 of _[It’s the Stars That Lie](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2033814/chapters/4713333)_ ); and that, while we don’t really know anything much yet about Alpha, or about how Cas and Dean and Bobby might have located each other after Sam said the meatsuit yes, I do know a lot about stone fruit, and orchards, and highly recommend late spring pink-white Georgia Belle peaches, warm off the tree.
> 
> Thanks always to the Author-Goddess, Seperis, for so graciously letting us play in her magical sandbox.


End file.
